When Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway said yesterday that the president-elect had been talking privately about moving the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in the weeks since the election, a long-dormant issue sprang to life. Can Donald Trump get away with altering a longstanding U.S. policy by recognizing at least the partial sovereignty of Israel over Jerusalem, a change the foreign policy establishment has told us would lead a cataclysm?

After watching Trump break every rule of American politics this year and then shock the international community after his victory by tossing aside the “One China” policy that had governed U.S. relations with the Far East since 1972, why would anyone doubt that he would be willing to do the same on Jerusalem? One of Trump’s chief drawbacks is his ignorance of complicated policy issues and his lack of respect for those who know more than he does. But even his critics have to admit that one of his strengths is his ability to view such topics from outside of the boxes in which those professionals have imprisoned themselves.

To Trump, if something doesn’t make sense to a layman, then maybe it’s not such a great idea. “One China” is a complicated formula that tacitly recognizes Beijing’s sovereignty over Taiwan while still supporting the island’s independence. But as far as he is concerned, America’s stance on the issue is just one more bargaining chip to be thrown into the pot in negotiations, not the religious obligation more experienced hands act like it is.

The same is true of Jerusalem. The refusal to move the embassy is a relic of the 1947 United Nations partition agreement in which the holy city was treated as an international zone—not allocated to either the putative Jewish state that became Israel or the Arab state the Muslim world rejected. Israel’s War of Independence ended with the city divided between parts controlled by the Jews and areas illegally occupied by Jordan (including the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, whose inhabitants were thrown out of their homes and their synagogues all destroyed). The western sector controlled by Israel was named its capital, but no nation recognized that designation or Israeli sovereignty over any part of the city. That didn’t change even after June 1967, when the city was reunited after the Six Day War.

The assumption of those promoting a two-state solution is that the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem would serve as the capital of the Palestinian state that would be created as part of a peace settlement. We don’t know whether the Palestinians will ever take yes for an answer and accept a peace that would recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders are drawn. But no reasonable person can dispute that Israel will always keep Western Jerusalem and those Jewish neighborhoods that were built after 1967. The city is the country’s capital, and always will be.

To a Middle East novice like Trump, recognizing this is just common sense. But for the foreign policy establishment, doing so would be a grave mistake. It would prejudge the outcome of peace negotiations, their thinking goes, and would result in violent riots throughout the Arab and Muslim world with unforeseen consequences. Yet Trump, with his outsider’s viewpoint, may get that these dire predictions are self-fulfilling prophecies, and trap the U.S. in a policy that perpetuates the conflict rather than moving towards a solution. If peace is to be achieved, the Palestinians and their supporters must accept that the Jewish presence in Jerusalem will never be reversed or its history erased (as the Palestinians have sought to do in various United Nations resolutions that designate the Temple Mount and the Western Wall as exclusively Muslim shrines).

It would be foolish to pretend that an embassy move would not cause problems or lead to riots ginned up by Islamists who hate the U.S. as much as they do Israel. But the world will not come to an end if the U.S. sends a signal to the world Washington has finally understood that the conventional wisdom about Jerusalem has done more to encourage Palestinian intransigence than it has to promote a solution. The new embassy would also not preclude a two-state solution or make it harder to achieve assuming the Palestinians wanted peace since all it would do is to make it easier for U.S. diplomats to travel between their new offices (at an empty site owned by the U.S. that has been designated for that purpose for decades) and Israeli government institutions they deal with.

On Jerusalem and One China, Trump may not be playing by the existing diplomatic rules. But it’s time for even those who doubted his fitness for the presidency to admit that those rules don’t always make sense and changing them might do more good than harm.

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When conservatives and conscience-addled liberals fret about the rising influence of censorious students on college campuses, the overwhelming response they get from skeptics is “who cares?” Those who do not outright defend creeping radicalism on campus are prone to minimize the threat of violence and fanaticism. While obtuse, this approach does have some immediate political utility. Dismissing events on campus as the antics of a few misguided kids casts those who care about such affairs as obsessive cranks who fixate on matters of no objective consequences. It goes without saying that not everyone is sincere who wonders aloud about the relevance of maximalist rhetoric, racial intolerance, and even violence on campus, but some are. They deserve an answer. Why should we care about rigidly enforced intellectual cloistering on campuses?

Those who contend that conservatives, in particular, overstate the threat on campus make several claims. These are the works of only a handful of misguided “college kids,” they contend. The few instances of extreme behavior on campus are not suggestive of any broader societal trend and don’t merit much attention. In fact, the limited scope of the problem, therefore, suggests that that conservative indignation is false–a convenient way to avoid confronting anti-social behavior among their ideological compatriots. All of this is fallacious.

First, to focus on the number of college students (not “kids,” almost all are of majority age) engaged in the aggressive censorship primarily of conservative speakers is to miss the point. Whole books have been written on the radicalization of American college students. This is not a limited phenomenon, but trying to quantify its appeal is an effort to counter an argument no one is making. Those who recognize the peril of this terrible new fad are focused more on the ideas expressed than the precise number of individuals expressing them.

Last night, for example, a group of students at Brown University was refreshingly forthright about those ideas when they called for the cancelation of a planned speech by TownHall editor and Fox News contributor Guy Benson. In a statement, the students railed against anyone who would advocate the “freedom” of “any person to make hateful, oppressive, or damaging remarks.” They added, “There is a wealth of writing on the inextricable connection between Benson’s ideologies—fiscal conservatism and free market ideology—and real, tangible, state violence against marginalized communities.” That is to say, the Bill of Rights and laissez-faire economics beget violence and racism—threats to life and liberty that legitimize virtually any reaction. It’s practically self-defense.

Confusing speech with violence and violence with speech is not merely the invention of these misguided Brown students. This bewildering delusion long ago migrated into the real world, where thought leaders and policymakers have embraced it. It is, however, fair to say that the intellectual foundations for this view of speech were set on American campuses and it is there that they are being used to justify proactivity and preemption.

“When someone calls a black person the ‘n’ word out of hatred, he or she is not expressing a new idea or outlining a valuable thought,” read a 2012 editorial in the Harvard Crimson. “They are committing an act of violence.” In 2017, a Wellesley College op-ed took this thought to its logical conclusion: “[I]f people are given the resources to learn and either continue to speak hate speech or refuse to adapt their beliefs, then hostility may be warranted.” A violent demonstration at Middlebury College for which five dozen students were disciplined after a professor was injured following a near-riot in response to author Charles Murray is the rare exception to the rule. Most anti-speech demonstrations on and off campus are peaceful; at least, for now. But the logic of coercive force to silence offensive speech is inescapable, and it has far broader purchase than these students’ defenders are willing to admit.

A 2015 survey by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA found that nearly 71 percent of freshmen believed that colleges should “prohibit racist/sexist speech.” At 43 percent, a strong plurality of surveyed freshmen agreed colleges should “have the right to ban extreme speakers” from campus. These ideas didn’t spring up ex nihilo; they were taught. The institute’s 2010-11 survey of college administrators, professors, and staff found that nearly 70 percent of female college faculty and almost half of their male counterparts believed that colleges should “prohibit” speech deemed racist or sexist.

Occasionally, sotto voce censorship finds a full-throated advocate like New York University vice Provost Ulrich Baer. In an April 2017 New York Times op-ed, he heaped praise on the “snowflakes,” as he approvingly called them, who use aggressive tactics to compel educational institutions to deny conservative speakers a platform. He justified this by contending that these students are only seeking to “no-platform” overtly racist speakers and limit the exposure of minority students to environments in which they feel threatened. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that these faculty members chose not to define what constitutes dangerous speech because they appreciate the overly broad definitions to which their students adhere. Prospective speakers like Ben Shapiro, Condoleezza Rice, Jason Riley, Christina Hoff Sommers, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali were not forced off campus because they countenance the views of the noxious alt-right.

Radicalization never occurs in a vacuum, and militancy and extremism is not exclusive to left-leaning students. This kind of uncompromising behavior results in reciprocal reactions from college Republicans, who are increasingly convinced that civility in the face of these affronts amounts to unilateral disarmament. This mentality begets a dangerous cycle best exemplified by the willingness of college Republican groups to invite poisonous speakers like Milo Yiannopoulos to address students not because he has anything of value to say but because it inspires their counterparts on the left to set their campus on fire.

In an open letter published in the Weekly Standard, UCLA professor Gabriel Rossman ably contended that this new conservative infatuation with provocation for its own sake is a byproduct of their orphanage on campus. “[T]he ideological skew of academia is that the dearth of conservative faculty means a lack of mentorship for conservative students,” he contended. A 2016 study of faculty voter registration in departments like economics, history, journalism, law, and psychology found Democrats outnumbering Republicans by a staggering 11.5 to 1. This disparity leads professors to feel comfortable misstating conservative ideas and reveling in divisive identity politics. It also leads students who are offended by those remarks to harass those professors into hiding.

None of this is healthy, and it does students no favors when conservatives who notice this suboptimal state of affairs are mocked for their concern. This has been years in the making. It is an outgrowth of the infantile “safe space” movement, opposition to which has cost faculty their jobs. It is a byproduct of the appeal of segregation based on racial, political, gender, and sexual identity. After all, exposure to people of distinct backgrounds and views amounts to what Northwestern University President Morton Schapiro called “uncomfortable learning.” It is imprudent, even reckless, to gamble that students who embrace extremism in college will outgrow it in the real world, particularly when it is being nurtured in them by their elders.

Observers on both sides of the political divide who have spoken out against radicalism on campus are not engaged in projection or dissociation. Quite the opposite, in fact; they are choosing not to look away. It is neither noble nor enlightened to witness thuggish authoritarianism and react with sarcasm for the benefit of the viewing audience on social media. There’s no risk in criticizing the contestants in the arena from the bleachers. History won’t look kindly on such cowardice, particularly if the toxic ideologies gestating in America’s collegiate hothouses survive in their hosts when they leave campus.

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Yes. That’s the answer to a question posed by the headline of Shmuel Rosner’s latest piece in the New York Times. Yes: Israeli students need to visit Auschwitz. All Jewish students should. Plenty of non-Jews, too.

Rosner disagrees. His piece, pegged to the news of Poland’s decision to “outlaw claims of Polish complicity in the Holocaust,” misguidedly argues that trips in which Israeli students visit the Polish death camps should end because “they contribute to a misperception by many Jews that remembering the Holocaust is the main feature of Judaism,” and because “they perpetuate the myth that Israel itself is born only of the ashes of Europe.”

Rosner goes on to cite a Pew study which found that “73 percent of American Jews believe ‘remembering the Holocaust’ is essential to being Jewish.” Rosner may mourn this statistic, but memory, in general, is a key part of Judaism. It’s also not entirely clear to me why anyone would consider it problematic for a people to prioritize the commemoration of the worst period in the entire history of their peoplehood. Maybe Rosner would also object to celebrating Passover, a holiday all about memory and remembrance.

If Rosner is truly concerned that Israeli students will exit Auschwitz with the belief that “Israel itself is born only of the ashes of Europe,” he should focus on improving the Israeli education system. I, for one, do not believe for a moment that students educated about the history of their own country would leave Poland with this assumption. If they did, it means their schooling needs to be improved, not that these trips need to be canceled.

The other piece of this is that we’re fighting a losing battle. How many Jews care today about the Spanish Inquisition? How many feel a visceral reaction when hearing the names Ferdinand and Isabella? We should be encouraging and funding more educational missions that solidify our remembrance of, and connection to our ancestors’ pasts. The farther away we get from the years of the Holocaust, the easier it will be to make denials—and those denials will be increasingly persuasive. That Rosner has concluded anything other than this from Poland’s recent decision is beyond baffling.

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My former colleagues at The Wall StreetJournal recently unearthed what should be a major political scandal. It involves an anti-American government, a prominent member of Congress, and a far-right group that traffics in anti-Semitism, homophobia, and conspiracy theories. In the current climate of anxiety about “collusion” and the alt-right, you would think the liberal media would give this story top billing.

You would think wrong. Nearly a week later, the prestige press is still giving the Journal exposé the chirping-crickets treatment. Perhaps that’s because the foreign regime in question is the Islamic Republic of Iran, the member of Congress is Democratic National Committee Deputy Chairman Keith Ellison, and the far-right group is the Nation of Islam.

The original Journal report by Jeryl Bier appeared in the op-ed pages. It meticulously detailed a 2013 meeting in New York hosted by Iranian President Hasan Rouhani and attended by Ellison and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. “The Nation of Islam website documents the event,” Bier wrote, “noting that Mr. Rouhani ‘hosted the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, Muslim leaders from different Islamic communities and members of the U.S. Congress at a private meeting.'” Several Nation of Islam outlets reported Ellison’s participation at the time, and the Minnesota representative hasn’t denied the story.

The episode raises serious questions about Ellison’s judgment and his real ideological convictions.

Ellison has spent much of his political career running away from Farrakhan. His ties to the group almost derailed his first congressional run, in 2006. After it emerged that he had worked with the Nation of Islam for at least 18 months in the 1990s, Ellison wrote a letter to the Jewish community distancing himself from Farrakhan and denouncing his “anti-Semitic statements and actions.” Ellison reiterated his opposition to the group’s “anti-Semitism” and “homophobia” in 2016 when he contested the DNC leadership.

But revulsion at his former associates in the Nation of Islam didn’t stop Ellison from breaking bread with Farrakhan in 2013–bread that was provided by the Tehran regime. So which is the real Ellison: The one who drafts earnest letters of apology to Jewish groups? Or the one who, as recently as 2013, saw it fit to dine with Farrakhan under Iranian auspices?

The Ellison-Farrakhan-Rouhani shindig is also a reminder that progressive Democrats had no compunction about hobnobbing with representatives of an anti-American terror state–until recently, that is. Today, Ellison is among the party’s loudest tub-thumpers regarding claims of Trump-Russian “collusion.” Yet he met privately with the Iranian president two years after the Obama administration’s Justice Department uncovered a plot by the Tehran regime to assassinate the Saudi ambassador on U.S. soil.

Ellison does not appear to have done anything illegal in meeting with Rouhani. Nor does this revelation neutralize or invalidate concerns about Russian interference in the 2016 election. But Republicans and conservatives can be forgiven for wondering if the Democrats’ newfound and highly selective hawkishness is a genuine effort to reckon with national-security realities or a ploy in a political game.

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In a New York Timesop-ed, Princeton University Professor Gary Bass recently contended that Donald Trump’s record on human rights is a disaster. In the effort to craft a comprehensive denunciation, Bass claimed that Trump is a menace not only when he “ignores” the issue of human rights but also “when he speaks up” about it. That surely covers all the bases.

Bass noted, with ample supporting evidence, that Donald Trump has a history of heaping ill-advised praise on foreign despots, both as president and before his time in the White House. Trump does seem enamored with the trappings of autocratic power, which is an unattractive trait in the chief executive of a republic. Bass flirts with superfluity, however, when he insisted that the president invokes human-rights concerns only “strategically” to serve as a “geopolitical cudgel.”

Bass claimed that Trump “rarely” condemn human-rights abuses against Muslims, but enthusiastically denounces violence against minority Christian populations. This is simply false. In November, the United States declared the violence being directed against Burma’s Rohingya Muslim minority “ethnic cleansing” and condemned the “horrendous atrocities” being executed both by the state’s security apparatus and vigilantes in the strongest of terms. Trump and his administration have also condemned terror attacks targeting Muslims in places like Egypt and Iran.

Bass conjectured that Trump sees human rights as a mere tool of statecraft, which he implies is a callous view. But if that is the case, he has a jaundiced view of America’s geopolitical interests and objectives. Bass claims that Trump’s condemnation of state-led oppression in places like North Korea, Cuba, Iran, Syria, and Venezuela is cheap—a desire only to address America’s parochial concerns and not the interests of humanity. But America’s national interest is to see these governments liberalize (or dissolve entirely), which would have the happy byproduct of increasing these states’ responsiveness to the welfare of their citizens.

Bass failed to appreciate the fact that no presidency has approached the issue of human-rights promotion as an entirely altruistic enterprise. Carter administration National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski recalled later in life that the pursuit of human-rights considerations was of “instrumental utility,” particularly with regard to the administration’s desire to isolate the Soviet Union. “Raising the issue of human rights pointed to one of the fundamental weaknesses of the Soviet system,” he asserted, “namely, that it was a system based on oppression.” Both the Republican and Democratic administrations that succeeded Carter’s adopted human-rights promotion as a pillar of America’s foreign policy doctrine. If anyone broke with this tradition, it was not Trump but Barack Obama.

The Obama administrationopened a dialogue with the regime in Iran even as protesters were being whipped with chains by motorcycle gangs on the streets of Tehran in 2009. They pursued a thaw in relations with Russia just months after Moscow invaded and carved up neighboring Georgia—a diplomatic offensive that was not cut off even after Russia cracked down on LGBT citizens and was determined to be culpable for the suspicious death of anti-corruption lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in 2009. It was Obama who looked the other way amid the near-genocide of Syrians and who declined to punish Bashar al-Assad for using chemical weapons on civilians. It was Obama who pursued no reciprocal commitments from the Communist regime in Havana in exchange for the unilateral normalization of relations with the United States; indeed, the arrest of dissidents increased ahead of Obama’s historic visit to the island nation. It was Obama who declined to speak out against the Venezuelan regime as it was executing civilians amid a wave of unrest in 2014, only belatedly sanctioning officials once the uprising had been quelled.

Obama’s defenders might call these observations “whataboutism,” but ignoring inconsistencies like these detracts from arguments like those in Bass’s op-ed. Surely, Obama saw utility in pursuing a cold-eyed foreign policy that failed to emphasize human rights; his desire was to secure more favorable relations with these abusive governments. But those like Bass who argue that the Trump administration has abdicated America’s responsibility to champion human rights cannot credibly argue that Obama did not do the same and with markedly more gusto than we’ve seen from this presidency.

Bass lands a variety of valid criticisms in his op-ed. He noted that the Trump administration has been tight-lipped when it comes to the abuses of America’s supposed strategic partners—the Philippines, Turkey, Egypt, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, and so on. He correctly observed that Trump’s indelicate comments about his detractors are reminiscent of the despotic regimes America traditionally opposes. Finally, as Bass noted, the attacks on “fake news” by Cambodia’s tyrant prime minister Hun Sen suggests that bad actors around the world see Trump’s example as one to emulate—a deeply disturbing prospect.

And yet, the idea that Trump “can’t credibly encourage demonstrations in Iran while berating protesters at home,” for example, is abject nonsense. The president is not merely one man but the foremost representative of the government of the United States on the world stage. Trump derives his authority from the Constitution and the legitimacy of the representative government to which he was elected. Bass claims that Trump is a hypocrite for highlighting the life-affirming stories of North Koreans who escaped tyranny to live free in America while simultaneously seeking dramatic decreases in the number of refugees the U.S. resettles domestically. Surely Bass would prefer that Trump abandon his refugee policy, but would he also have Trump remain mum on the crimes committed by North Korea only to avoid the subjective appearance of hypocrisy? That’s not a human-rights policy at all. It’s not statecraft of any sort, in fact. It’s pique.

This presidency would be immeasurably easier to defend if the president were not a part of it. But critics of Trump who literally claim that he is damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t are not convincing anyone of their sincerity.

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Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson was found dead at his apartment in Berlin over the weekend, and police are still investigating the cause. He was 48. Jóhannsson’s richly textured soundscapes and his tremendous contributions to film will long endure.

I first came across Jóhannsson’s work in Sicario, Denis Villeneuve’s brutal drug-war thriller from 2015. Like 2001’s Traffic, Sicario treats of the human cost of the narcotics trade on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. But unlike the genre-bending Traffic, which had elements of political drama, family tragedy, and even buddy-cop comedy, Sicario is all menace. And much of that menace owes to Jóhannsson’s soundtrack.

Melding electronic and classical elements, a Jóhannsson signature, the score perfectly tracks the movie’s striking aerial shots of the border and sudden bursts of violence. We hear tribal drums and a kind of aggressive, pure bass sound seemingly recorded in the depths of hell. But there are also elegiac notes that underscore the fruitlessness of the War on Drugs and the lives broken by the cartels. It is one of those soundtracks about which one can say that it is impossible to imagine the movie without it.

Then came the astonishing score for 2016’s Arrival, also directed by Villeneuve. Again Jóhannsson layered electronic and classical elements, this time adding odd and eerie vocal effects to create music that sounds as though it might have been brought to planet earth by the Heptapod aliens. It is too bad Villeneuve decided to part ways with Jóhannsson when it came to last year’s Blade Runner 2049. The director reportedly wanted a score more reminiscent of the one composed by Vangelis for the original movie; he ditched Jóhannsson and hired Hollywood standby Hans Zimmer to create it. And while Zimmer’s score for Blade Runner 2049 is beautiful and admirably Vangelis-esque, I wonder what Jóhannsson would have done with the film’s surreal images. What I would give to have heard Jóhannsson’s music for a love scene involving two androids and an operating system with a soul!

I also was fortunate to see Jóhannsson perform his feature album Orphée live at London’s Barbican Centre in 2016, a sublime audiovisual feast. It is difficult to describe Orphée. Recorded samples (a young boy counting to ten in German, for example), minimal percussive effects, and looping piano melodies combine to transport the listener into a haunting dream. The word “other-worldly” comes to mind in relation to the album and, indeed, Jóhannsson’s entire body of work. His death is a great loss to contemporary music and the cinema.

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